Server overhead, and whatnot should not be anymore CPU demanding then any other MMO guys, they all (MMO's) have heavy overhead when it comes to all the stuff egbtmagus mentioned. It's more likely that EQ2 has a ****ty T&L implementation and far to much geometry is being procesed on the CPU rather then GPU as it should be, they may have done this so it scales "Better" with slower video cards, but they dident do us high end folks any favors, thats for sure. And EQ1 ALWAYS ran better then EQ2. Im not expecting to run the game at max details and settings, never was. I can't get what I consider exceptable performance out of "Balenced" with water set to fast update and shadows off. For a long time in EQ1 I was forced to use the old models. But the game still ran well enough. When I first got EQ1 in 99 I was on a Celeron 300a @464 with a TNT1. The game performed great in comparison to EQ2 at the time. I dident start having problems until Kunark, at which point I got a Celeron 566@935 and a Voodoo 2. This also ran the game quite well up until Luclin when I got a 1.4 Ghz Thunderbird and Geforce 2. etc etc.. Your comparison is invalid, EQ'2s not doing somthing right, obviously when it comes to Geometry, it should not require the CPU load it does, somthing's not being offloaded like it should be.